Arts & Entertainment

Best Country Band St. Louis 2005 - The Round-Ups

If the Round-Ups stare down country music with a distorted tunnel vision, they stagger far enough through the underground to reach the light -- a drunk-blind flash, but a light all the same. Booze and bullets, cigarettes and insanity, musical saw and mutilated harmonies, yee-haws and yelps -- by now their cowpunk antics should have worn as thin as lead singer and songwriter Tom Herd's hiccupping drawl. Au contraire, as most nights their onstage mob scene throws down all the flim-flam stomp and shout of a medicine show gone haywire and to hell. They can play, but not if staying in tune and time means sitting out all the fun that fucking with country music affords. Cheap thrills, sure, but they relentlessly rock the twang and leave polished pros eating their sawdust.